Smoking ban on council agenda

The San Angelo City Council will discuss what changes, if any, it wants to make to the smoking ban ordinance at one of its upcoming meetings.

SAN ANGELO, Texas - After a special meeting Monday, at least four San Angelo City Council members said they would support making some changes to the smoking ban ordinance to minimize its impact on business owners.

The council will decide when to discuss and vote on the changes — as well as what some of the changes might be — at the end of its regular meeting today.

The 30-day waiting period for the smoking-ban ordinance began Monday after the council accepted the election results for the two propositions San Angelo voters approved in the Nov. 2 general election. It will go into effect Dec. 15.

After the council heard from one business owner who asked the council to exempt her business from the smoking ban, City Attorney Lysia Bowling reminded council members that the city charter says the council does not have to wait to change an ordinance that has been in place less than six months if at least four members vote to consider amending it.

“An amendment change can be earlier, before the six months, if four members of City Council vote for the reconsideration, so we would just work to see how we would work within the limitations in our ordinance,” Bowling said.

Noting that there is potential for substantive changes as well as necessary changes, such as certain verbiage that needs to be modified to be consistent with the city charter, Mayor Alvin New said he would seek council consensus at the end of today’s regular meeting.

“At the end of the council meeting when we’re talking about future agenda items, I’ll look for consensus on the must-do items on this, and I’ll also seek whether there’s consensus to move forward on anything else related to this,” New said.

One business owner addressed the council during public comment after it voted to accept the election results.

Mimi Staha, owner of Colonel’s Tobacco Shop, read a letter from the president of the Texas Cigar Merchants Association that said the ordinance, which would prevent Staha’s customers from sampling tobacco products in her shop because it is in a strip shopping center, would be “extremely detrimental” to her business.

Staha said she is willing to install a ventilation system in her shop, something she called efficient but costly.

“I cannot move,” Staha said of her business location. “I am hoping that it can be slightly modified on my behalf.”

New promised Staha the city will make efforts to “learn what we can” and then “should do” in terms of changes to the ordinance and noted that her business was made exempt in the version of the smoke-ban ordinance the city had proposed in the negotiation phase of the petition process.

Smoke-Free San Angelo, the group that petitioned for the smoke ban and requested the original version be placed on the November ballot, rejected the city’s version because the City Council voted to exempt bars from it.

Smoke-Free San Angelo had expressed support for other changes, such as the exemption of cigar shops from the ban as long as they provided adequate ventilation.

At least four council members expressed support for exempting Colonel’s and making other changes Smoke-Free had accepted to minimize the ordinance’s impact on businesses, including hotels.

However, both New and other council members cited the need for respecting the ordinance that voters approved, making the potential for the exemption of bars from the ordinance unlikely.

Councilman Paul Alexander said that exempting bars would be too big a change to the ordinance for him to support but that he is eager to support minor modifications to the ordinance to help businesses.

“That’s a major change,” Alexander said of the possible exemption of bars. “I don’t think we can change that.”

When asked about the other potential changes, including the portion that allows hotels to allow smoking in 20 percent of rooms for the next four years, Alexander said the council needs to hear from the business owners on how it will affect their revenue.

“They need to chime in and let us know what’s happening to their business,” he said.

New said council members will have to “vote their conscience” when deciding what changes to make.

“We will go to work on learning what we can do, and then after that, the discretion part is what should we do. And I think each one up here will have to make that decision, and everyone will understand that it did pass, it did go through in a certain way, so people will vote their conscience on that,” New said.

“We are all aware of what the negotiations were, what seemed to be points of compromise.”